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Germany Installs 775 MW Of PV In Q1 2013

Derived from German-language reports, Germany’s Federal Environment Minister, Peter Altmaier, announced that the country had added 290 megawatts (MW) of new photovoltaic capacity in March.

This information comes ahead of expected Federal Network Agency figures, but if the information proves to be accurate then that not only means that Germany has installed 775 MW of photovoltaic capacity in the first quarter of 2013.

The figure is actually lower than any of the decreasing monthly installations from the end of 2012, but higher than the 275 MW installed in January and 211 MW in February this year. These fluctuations are laid at the feet of the reductions to the German solar feed-in tariff that took place at the beginning of this year. However, the low average for each month may in fact slow the continual decrease to PV FiTs.

Germany installed a record amount of PV last year, reaching 7.6 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in a year that concluded with a tapering decline in installation (reports showed that “611 megawatts had been installed in October, 435 MW in November and 360 MW in December.”

PV-Magazine did some rough calculations based on the new figures which describe what the FITs might look like in May;

If this proves correct, the government mandated photovoltaic construction limit of 2.5 to 3.5 GW would be exceeded by more than 1.8 GW. As such, feed-in tariffs would fall by a further 1.8% in May, to between €0.1082 to €0.1563/kWh, depending on system size.

If more is installed in March than 290 MW, then solar subsidies would fall by 2.2% in May.

The German Federal Network Agency, the fantastically named Bundesnetzagentur, will most likely have these figures release officially in the next day or three.

About the Author

Joshua S Hill I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket!
I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

wondering why when the skies are filled with sun-dimming chemtrails, yet everyone ignores or is oblivious.

James Wimberley

Any thoughts on why the installation rate has crashed so fast? It’s unlikely to be the last round of FIT cuts, which basically tracked installation costs, leaving the financial return more or less unchanged. I guess it was the policy uncertainty stirred up by Altmeier and friends with talk of fundamental changes to the EEG. What really scares people off is the risk of retroactive changes to the FIT, or proxies like grid access charges.

” … the fantastically named Bundesnetzagentur..”
Quite normal in an agglutinative language. There a nice Deutschlish sign in Frankfurt airport, which has both a local and an inter-city train station, for “Traintickets”. Germans find the chained appositions of Anglo headlines equally strange as (real example from many years ago) “Oxon man on wife murder bid charge.”

Bill_Woods

They’ve been ramping the FiT rates down sharply over the last year, from 13.50-19.50 Ecents/kW-h last April (depending on size) to 11.02-15.92 this month. The goal is to get the annual increase below 3.5 GW/year (290 MW/month), which I guess they’re getting close to.http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=12092

Bob_Wallace

With Germany’s high electricity cost and very low solar installation price it’s not clear that subsidies are needed any longer.

The goal of making solar competitive with grid electricity has been met.

—

ETA: It looks like Germany may be getting ready to move subsidy money from solar to storage in order to create a decent storage market.

http://twitter.com/eurolinesolar Chris Aloise

Bob, I think you are spot on..and I hope to share another new German innovation in the coming months…..

Bill_Woods

If solar’s competitive, then why the slump in installation over the last six months? Has every house with a southish-facing roof got panels already?

Bob_Wallace

I don’t know. Perhaps they had a meeting and someone suggested “Hey, let’s slow things down and give Bill Woods a thrill.”.

Bill_Woods

Well, if so they should have checked with me first; I remain unthrilled. Somewhat more likely, they had a meeting and decided to cut the installation rate in half in order to meet the government’s target — even though it meant leaving a big pile of money on the table. More likely still, the pile of money wasn’t that big.

Wind Energy

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